Behind Closed Doors: What Really Happens When Cops Question Kids

Police interrogation raises difficult legal, normative, and policy questions because of the State\u27s need to solve crimes and obligation to protect citizens\u27 rights. These issues become even more problematic when police question juveniles. For more than a century, justice policies have reflected two competing visions of youth: vulnerable and immature versus responsible and adult-like. A century ago, Progressive reformers emphasized youths\u27 immaturity and created a separate juvenile court to shield children from criminal trials and punishment. 2 By the end of the twentieth century, lawmakers adopted get tough policies, which equated adolescents with adults and punished youths more severely. 3 Over the past three decades, these changes have transformed the juvenile court from a social welfare agency into a second-class criminal court. 4 The direct results - institutional confinement - and collateral consequences - transfer to criminal court, use of delinquency convictions to enhance sentences, or sex offender registration - preclude fewer protections for interrogating juveniles than questioning adults.

Competence, Culpability, and Punishment: Implications of Atkins for Executing and Sentencing Adolescents

The Supreme Court has explored the issues of culpability, proportionality, and deserved punishment most fully in the context of capital punishment. In death penalty decisions addressing developmental impairments and culpability, the Court has considered the cases of defendants with mental retardation and older adolescents, and has created an anomalous inconsistency by reaching opposite conclusions about the deserved punishment for each group of defendants. Recently, in Atkins v. Virginia, the Court relied on both empirical and normative justifications to categorically prohibit states from executing defendants with mental retardation. Atkins reasoned that mentally retarded offenders lacked the reasoning, judgment, and impulse control necessary to equate their culpability with that of other death-eligible criminal defendants. This Article contends that the same psychological and developmental characteristics that render mentally retarded offenders less blameworthy than competent adult offenders also characterize the immaturity of judgment and reduced culpability of adolescents and should likewise prohibit their execution. Moreover, the diminished criminal responsibility of adolescents has broader implications for proportionality in sentencing young offenders. Because the generic culpability of adolescents differs from that of responsible adults, penal proportionality requires formal, categorical recognition of youthfulness as a mitigating factor in sentencing

A Slower Form of Death: Implications of Roper v. Simmons for Juveniles Sentenced to Life Without Parole

The Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons 1 interpreted the Eighth Amendment to prohibit states from executing offenders for crimes they committed when younger than eighteen years of age. The Court relied on objective indicators of evolving standards of decency, such as state statutes and jury decisions to support its judgment that a national consensus existed against executing adolescents. The Justices also conducted an independent proportionality analysis of youths\u27 criminal responsibility and concluded that their reduced culpability warranted a categorical prohibition of execution. Juveniles\u27 immature judgment, susceptibility to negative peer influences, and transitory personality development diminished their criminal responsibility. Because of their reduced culpability, the Court held that they could never deserve or receive the most severe sentence imposed on adults

Police Interrogation of Juveniles: An Empirical Study of Policy and Practice

The Supreme Court does not require any special procedural safeguards when police interrogate youths and use the adult standard--“knowing, intelligent, and voluntary under the totality of the circumstances”--to gauge the validity of juveniles\u27 waivers of Miranda rights. Developmental psychologists have studied adolescents\u27 capacity to exercise Miranda rights, questioned whether juveniles possess the cognitive ability and adjudicative competence necessary to exercise legal rights, and contended that immaturity and vulnerability make juveniles uniquely susceptible to police interrogation tactics. In the four decades since the Court decided Miranda, we have almost no empirical research about what actually occurs when police interview criminal suspects, and we have no research about how police routinely question delinquents. Since 1994, the Minnesota Supreme Court has required police to record all interrogations of criminal suspects, including juveniles. This Article begins to fill the empirical void about adolescents\u27 competence in the interrogation room. It analyzes quantitative and qualitative data-- interrogation tapes and transcripts, police reports, juvenile court filings, and probation and sentencing reports--of routine police interrogation of fifty-three juveniles sixteen years of age or older and charged with felony-level offenses who waived their Miranda rights. It provides the first empirical analyses of the tactics and techniques police use to interrogate juveniles and how youths respond to them. Based on the data analyses, the Article addresses three interrogation policy issues: mandatory recording; limiting the lengths of interrogation; and the use of false evidence to elicit confessions

Criminalizing Juvenile Justice: Rules of Procedure for the Juvenile Court

The 1967 United States Supreme Court decision In re Gault 1 precipitated a procedural revolution that has transformed the juvenile court into a legal institution very different from that envisioned by its Progressive creators. 2 In the years since Gault, states have struggled to bring the administration of their juvenile courts into harmony with the requirements of the Constitution, 3 aided by professional commentary and the continuing evolution of juvenile procedural due process requirements